The reinstatement of slavery in Afghanistan removes all doubt that the Taliban intend to subject Afghanistan to a hideously regressive form of government.

On January 4, 2026, the Taliban quietly approved and circulated a new Criminal Procedure Code intended to govern criminal justice across Afghanistan. There was no public announcement, no explanation to the population whose lives it would reshape, no debate. Issued in Dari and Pashto and transmitted directly to judges and provincial courts, it entered into force as if it were a routine administrative update. It was nothing of the sort.

For weeks, the code attracted little attention outside Afghanistan. It surfaced only later through the painstaking work of Afghan lawyers and human rights organizations in exile who obtained the text, read it closely, and grasped its significance. This was not merely another edict. It was the consolidation of a system of legal domination. As Afghanistan has receded into the background of a crowded global crisis agenda, the Taliban have learned that the most durable repression is the kind that arrives quietly.

This matters not only for Afghans, but also for US policymakers still debating whether the Taliban represent a static extremist movement or a regime capable of long-term governance. The new criminal procedure code provides an answer. The Taliban do not intend to govern through chaos. They are governing through law.

The contrast with the Islamic State is instructive. When the world recoiled from ISIS rule in Iraq and Syria, the lesson seemed obvious: overt terror produces overt resistance. ISIS governed through violent spectacle—public executions, amputations, mass punishment, and the deliberate display of cruelty. It succeeded briefly, but it could not endure. Populations fled, resistance hardened, and international intervention followed. ISIS collapsed under the weight of its own visibility.

The Taliban have drawn a different conclusion. They are governing for the long term. Their new criminal procedure code normalizes tyranny rather than loudly announcing it. Rather than relying on constant displays of violence, it embeds coercion into judicial routine. Through technical language, evidentiary thresholds, and selective recognition of harm, repression becomes the means of administration.

The danger lies precisely in how unremarkable the document appears. It is lengthy, procedural, and written in the neutral idiom of jurisprudence. Yet within its provisions lies a radical narrowing of who is protected, what counts as harm, and when suffering is even permitted to exist in legal terms. Violence against women is not so much prohibited as redefined. Only injuries severe enough to satisfy a judge cross the threshold of criminality; coercion, confinement, intimidation, and forced compliance largely disappear from legal concern.

A woman who flees abuse does not find protection in this system. She risks criminalization herself, as do those who shelter her. The law enforces return, not safety. Even the language of freedom is conditional. The code preserves distinctions between those deemed “free” and those described as “slaves,” a categorization that has no place in any legal system claiming authority in the 21st century. Here, dependency is not a social failure. It is a legal condition.

American readers should recognize this logic. In the early years of the post-9/11 era, US government lawyers produced legal opinions that redefined torture so narrowly that only pain equivalent to organ failure or death would qualify as illegal. The result was the legal sanitization of human rights abuses. Practices long prohibited under international law were rendered permissible by definition. Those opinions were later repudiated, but the damage to victims, to legal norms, and to US credibility was real and enduring.

The Taliban’s new code operates on the same principle, without even the pretense of internal correction. Rather than denying violence, it regulates when violence matters. Rather than banning coercion, it recasts it as private, permissible, or legally irrelevant.

For US policymakers, this has direct implications. The Taliban are often framed as incapable of institutional governance, a movement reliant on arbitrary force rather than systematic control. The criminal procedure code demonstrates the opposite. The regime is building a legal architecture designed to outlast sanctions cycles, diplomatic isolation, and shifting international attention. Engagement strategies premised on gradual moderation misunderstand the nature of what is taking shape.

This also complicates long-standing counterterrorism assumptions. In Afghanistan today, institutionalization is not producing restraint; it is producing permanence. Law, not legitimacy, is doing the work. The Taliban do not need recognition to entrench control. They need only time and silence.

ISIS frightened people into flight. The Taliban are conditioning people into submission.

Both pursue the same destination: a society without pluralism, without autonomy for women, and without protection for minorities or dissenters. The difference lies in the method. ISIS was too visible to endure. The Taliban have learned that quiet law lasts longer than loud terror.

That is why this criminal procedure code matters more than many of the Taliban’s more theatrical decrees. It signals that repression no longer requires constant force. It has been legalized, delegated, and normalized. When cruelty is embedded in procedure, resistance becomes harder to imagine, let alone organize.

History suggests that systems built this way rarely remain contained. When governments legislate whose pain counts and whose does not, the erosion of rights accelerates, definition by definition. The tragedy of Afghanistan today is not only that this is happening, but that it is happening quietly, while the world looks elsewhere.

For Washington, the lesson is uncomfortable but unavoidable. If US policy continues to focus narrowly on security coordination, sanctions calibration, or episodic humanitarian exemptions, it risks misreading the regime it confronts. Afghanistan is becoming a case study in how authoritarian systems can survive without mass terror, without international approval, and without constant coercion.

That may be the most dangerous lesson the Taliban have learned of all, and the one the United States can least afford to ignore.

About the Author: Victoria Fontan

Dr. Victoria Fontan is a visiting fellow at the Center for South Asia at Stanford University. She is also co-chair of the Alliance for the Education of Women in Afghanistan. She was previously provost of the American University of Afghanistan. 

Image: Alexey Smyshlyaev / Shutterstock.com.

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